Most wanted
by The cursed child
Summary: Katherin Beckett, after disappearing without a trace eight years ago, surfaces to kill presidential candidate Bracken's opponent. For two weeks the world is in uproar as the day of the voting results arrives, and the assassin turns up in Castle's apartment with proof of her innocence; A tiny audio tape.
1. Chapter 1

Richard Castle walks down the busy New York street with a ridiculously sweet concoction people shouldn't call coffee in his hand. He enters his building and takes the stairs up for some extra exercise and reaches for his jacket pocket. The keys jingle a merry tune as he opens the lock to his appartment.

With his headphones in his ears, drowning out the noise of city life, he pushes at the door and throws the keys someplace he won't be able to find later. Castle bounces his elbow on the surface behind him to stop anybody from following him in and hands the not-coffee to his studying daughter.

He can read enough lips to figure out she thanks him and then moves up the stairs to Skype with her latest boyfriend. He likes the young man well enough, but wishes Alexis would consider taking a break from dating after what happened last time.

"Every law enforcement agency we have is still looking for Katherine Beckett," the guy from the news says suddenly after finishing his lecture on global warming. Castle turns the volume on his phone up to listen in on the latest about the world's number one terrorist. "After assassinating Senator Bracken's opponent in the Presidential Election, Miss Beckett fled without a trace. Sources have confirmed that she has not yet left the United States, rumors even speculating that she never Left New York City at all. The homicide detective turned traitor has evaded the full force of the NYPD, FBI, NSA, CIA, and other counter-terrorism associations for two weeks."

The beautiful Katherine Beckett, whose picture is undoubtedly flashing on his phone by now, looks at the citizens of Castle's side of the Atlantic from every screen, and has been for thirteen whole days. The photo they all use is dated back eight years ago, where she still has an ironic smile on her face, accentuating her cheekbones. It was taken the same day she disappeared, and she hasn't been seen since, only DNA evidence left at the crime scene clueing the world in on the murderer's identity. That, and the bullet having been matched to her service weapon.

"The Republican Party's new candidate is behind in the polls by almost seventy-eight percent, unheard of this close to the date our nation changes once again. Four days left until the eight of November, and we impatiently wait for Senator Bracken to complete his rise to power and better our nation."

Impartial, this speaker was not. Castle snorts and stops the live update, removing the buds from his ears and shedding his coat. He makes his way to his office where another four hundred and seventy two James Bond books await his signature. He still can't believe he was asked to write 007 and has gotten this popular. His whole hand is cramping from the last session of writing down his autograph at the West-Coast book tour.

There, in his luxurious chair, is the #1 Most Wanted, sipping coffee from his World's Best Dad mug which Alexis gave him a decade ago. A full meal is spread on his desk, probably the entire contents of his fridge. The writer looks at the intruder and thinks she could use another few dinners like this. Castle doesn't need to be able to see beneath her baggy hoody to notice the bony fingers of the hand around the cup and the unhealthily prominent cheekbones of her face. The fugitive probably hasn't eaten since her target dropped dead.

He doesn't want to know how long this dangerous woman has been here, feet away from his unsuspecting daughter. "Beckett, what do you want?" he asks, refusing to glance over his shoulder to check if the redhead is coming back down.

"You," she states as she rolls her chair away from the desk and fluidly stands up. The answer confuses him, but his focus is on the phone in his hand, two taps away from calling 911 and getting the cops. Beckett has long since spotted his attempt and snatches his wrist just as his thumb hovers above the green button. Digits wrap around his arm as the other gently extracts the smartphone.

"Subtlety is not your strong suit, Castle," she mentions as she circles around him like a huntress stalking her prey. The pager on his belt, which Gina insisted on, gets taken as well. It is only than that the writer notices the woman is limping, her left knee practically giving up on her every other step.

The other noticeable observations are the badge around her neck and the lack of gun where he'd expected one. The badge is a mockery, but easily ignorable, seeing as Castle isn't as passionate about the symbolism of it as the NYPD would be, but the missing weapon makes no sense at all. A writer pays special attention to details, and the murder weapon of a presidential homicide is a very crucial one.

If she calls him blunt, he will be. "Where's your gun?" he questions as he stares straight ahead. He is determined not to show her any fear. If he's going to die, he'll do so with as much dignity as double-oh-seven. After three books on the famous spy, he feels a tiny bit more courageous than he should.

Kate tilts her head to the side, taking in this man whose novels kept her mother hooked for hours on end. The same novels which she has read again and again since the year of her exile from society to keep herself motivated and as close to her mom as possible. This writer, who cannot save her, might be able to tell her mom's story, even though it's already too late to matter.

"I have no idea," she admits honestly, "Bracken will probably plant it in my last hide-out before the cops raid it, and completing the story he wants the people to believe in with it."

"Plant it?" Castle asks incredulously, his voice raising a tiny bit and breaking his composure by searching for her eyes. A terrorist being framed might make for a good book, but confronted with it now that the world is upside down with panic, it just sounds like a sad sob story. "Senator Bracken?" he follows up once he registers the name.

She ignores him, nails skimming over the bindings of his privet Derrick Storm collection. "My mom loved your books," she whispers as the series ends at Storm Fall and her hand drops back to her side..

"Loved? As in not anymore?" Despite the extensive news coverage, Castle knows nothing of her parents. "Dead, both of them," she supplies, "She was murdered. My dad drank himself to death when I had to disappear." Kate twists her hand in her hair, causing the blue hood to fall away from her head, revealing her face fully.

Castle startles at the clearer version of her appearance more than the new information. Her sunken eyes and the blue bags beneath them are black from punches. She has taken a severe beating from someone very recently. Her hair is still as beautiful as it was on the photo he's seen a thousand times already, only now it is about five times as long, reaching to the bottom of her shoulder blades.

"Are you okay, Beckett?" he worries, only belatedly realizing he shouldn't care. Kate looks at him with a frown, trying to figure out his angle. Paranoia hasn't been good for her already shaky trust issues.

"I've been worse," she dismisses his concern, gesturing with her head that he should take a seat at his desk. She prefers being taller than her suspects, and wearing heals is deadly in her precarious situation. Also, she can't put any weight on her knee, hasn't been able too since Maddox fractured the cap with a bullet. That had been worse.

Castle takes a seat, trying to figure out how he can get himself and Alexis out of the house alive. His laptop is gone, and she took his pager and phone. He leafs through his mental catalogue of likewise situations he put his characters through, but finds nothing that can help him until he succeeds in distracting Beckett. She hasn't tied him up yet, so that's good.

Instead of talking, Beckett presses the play button of a device he hadn't even seen yet. A voice emits from the audio tape and turns Castle's view of the world on its axis. Senator Bracken's unmistakable voice admits to murder and coldly speaks of Johanna Beckett's impending death. All the thoughts of escaping are banished from his mind.

"Johanna Beckett is your mother," Castle dumbly states when the tape stops. He's busy trying to process the fact that the man who is about to become president has murdered and blackmailed people in what sounded as cold blood. Suddenly a framing doesn't sound all that improbable anymore.

Kate nods to confirm it and retrieves the tape like her life depends on it. Most likely, it does. "Why didn't you bring this to the cops?" It is the first question he has, no matter how important other subjects might seem. With this evidence, Bracken's career will be over and he will spend the rest of his life in prison. It might even clear Beckett's name by confirming at least a part of her story.

"The cop you hear is Roy Montgomery, he runs the twelfth where I worked homicide. I went higher up, trusted the wrong people, and got this for my trouble." She taps her injured knee, giving Castle a flawless view of her backside.

"I struck a deal with Bracken in exchange for my life and everyone I cared about." Back then, there had been dozens of those; Ryan, Espo, her dad, Roy, Mike Royce. These days, she can't afford to love people, and any feelings she might've had in the past have ebbed away. She's content to know four out of five are still alive, no matter how betrayed she feels by her captain's actions. "It worked for years, but the future Mister President is tying up loose ends, and that means me and this tape." She'd mistakenly found it when she knocked the inconspicuous container from her desk, getting everything she ever dreamed of in a package that lead her straight to hell.

As a mystery writer, it doesn't take all that long to connect the dots. She had been framed to discredit her character and enable Bracken to kill her with extreme prejudice. "But why draw all this attention to you?" Wiping someone of the board is a lot easier when everyone assumes she is still in hiding and has stopped searching.

"He couldn't find me," Kate reports with a slightly prideful tone. "Bracken had to draw me out, and by framing me for his opponent's murder he kills three birds with one stone." This way he guarantees the outcome of the selection, erases Beckett from the game, and promotes himself by solving the greatest murder of the 21st century ruthlessly, efficiently and effectively.

"And he made it look like you weren't after him but the other guy so nobody would connect the two of you," Castle finishes for her. It's really ingenious; he should use it in his new series, the perfect Red Herring.

Kate retrieves a thick manila folder from under her hoodie, making her even thinner than he'd previously guessed. "I am a dead woman walking," she says as he gets handed the file on Johanna Beckett's murder and all the dirt she has on Bracken, including the source of his endless funds; dirty money, drugs, blackmail, murder. Castle pages back and forth as he skims through the hundred plus documents filled with data. "They tried to stage my suicide yesterday, which is how I got these," she says with a gesture at her face wounds. It had been the trigger to convince her to reach out. Her mom deserves justice, and this writer might be able to give her that.

The door to Alexis' bedroom makes a sound, and Kate is out the door with one last request: "I want you to write this story. Think about it."


	2. Chapter 2

Castle stays up all night, going through Beckett's file with the utmost care. He sends Alexis and his mother to the Hamptons for safety during the process, just paranoid enough to worry they might get hurt if they stay in the city. He doesn't hesitate about the truthfulness of the story the newest woman in his life just told him. The evidence she's collected is overwhelming, and getting its contents to the people is not the simple act of handing it over to the nearest cop. Kate has tried that twice before already, and each time she chose the wrong people.

He locks the file in the safe which usually holds the manuscript of his next book and goes outside for some fresh air. New York is plagued by posters of Beckett on every corner, and he wonders how she ever managed to get into his building without being recognized. He suspects that she somehow never left the city like the rumors suggested. She obviously has been diligently practising her ninja skills during the time she was gone.

"Hey, Castle," a playful voice greets him before he is pulled into an alley with an extraordinarily pretty woman pressed against him like a lover. Kate has her arms wrapped around his neck, lips just below his ear. "You make a decision yet?" she quizzes quietly, fully tense and on alert a few feet away from the crowd. The cold weather allows her to look perfectly normal with a scarf wrapped around half her face and a cute woolen hat obscuring the rest of it.

"I'll do whatever I can to help," he whispers back, hands on her hips. Beckett intrigues him more than he is willing to admit. The danger is an allure that he can't resist and the story is priceless. He has worked with the CIA before, he can do this too. It's might be an overestimation of his own skills, but he has a lot of people who should be willing to help him.

"All I need you to do is tell my mom's story. It's too late to change the future." It sounds like she's repeating a lie she's told herself. Kate no longer knows how to live without running, and she wants to stop. Even if she could manage to bring Bracken to justice, her own life is over. Spite will cause the senator to order one last hit, hers. She's okay with that, as long as she can stop hiding in the shadows.

"Kate, we can get you out of this. The future isn't set in stone. We have three days."

Beckett sniggers into his shoulder. "You want to take down the upcoming president of the United States of America in seventy-two hours," she chuckles, her arms tightening around his neck. It has been years since she hugged another person, and the closeness is indescribable, though the writer she is pressed against might say otherwise. Castle should have a vocabulary that can put what she is feeling into words.

"You have the evidence, all we need is a way to reveal it to the world. I have friends, contacts. Bracken can't become president." Even though he hasn't even known her for a whole day, he is desperate by the end. It is something about her that created an instant connection. He clutches onto her a little tighter, preventing her from moving away and disappearing like he knows she wants to. Kate is scared.

"He won't," she says with conviction. Years ago, she'd made a deal with the senator for her own selfish reasons, and it had come back to bite her in the ass. This time, there is a whole nation at stake, and she no longer has any selfishness left. At least, that's how she sees it. Castle has another idea.

"You're not a killer," he says in the same tone. He inexplicably knows it to be the absolute truth even though he has no proof but the file she gave him. He lets her go but keeps a firm grip on her arm, pulling her back out onto the street and into his building. He waves at the man sitting behind the front desk and pulls Kate along.

Once they're alone and safe in his apartment he frees her arm and guides her to the couch. Picking up their conversation from downstairs, Kate speaks up: "I might not be the one pulling the trigger, but neither is Bracken, and we killed the same people. I put the targets on their heads. Reporters, cops, lawyers, I've tried them all. Bracken's net is spread all over the country. They won't know about you until it's already far too late to do anything."

The book will be published and viral by the time Bracken figures out it exists. The truth will be out in the open and killing Castle would be redundant. She can hope for that much.

"I'm not letting him turn you into something you're not." He knows her better than her knows himself. The dossier is more about Kate than it is about Johanna, even if she doesn't realize it herself. Still, the young Beckett is blind to everything but her mom's case, barely aware of her own situation.

She is as far away from him as she can be on the three-seater. Any physical contact is strictly off limits already. From her place on the armrest, she shakes her head in pity of his ignorance. "Everybody is a killer, Castle, don't let anyone tell you otherwise."

"That's a really depressing view of the world," Castle scolds, considering offering her a nice glass of red to take the edge of. She looks awfully tense, not that she doesn't have an excuse. She pours one for the both of them. They each take a sip.

"You would kill for Alexis, wouldn't you?" she inquires, though she already knows the answer. Kate doesn't wait for a reply. "See, everyone has a trigger, a button others can push, Bracken found mine." There's shame in her voice, like she can't be proud of her weaknesses. Compared to the average citizen, Beckett has a triggerline that lays far higher than anybody else's. She kills in cold blood when a criminal mastermind is about to be named one of the most powerful men in the world. Even than, they might later call it justified, maybe self-defence or whatever term is politacally correct for the situation Kate is going to create.

He takes a seat on his own couch, taking care to sit not too far and not too close. If her streches his arm he can just reach her booted ankle. "What happened?" he asks, tapping his own eye to implicate the unsuccesfull faked suicide attemp from two days earlier.

She smiles at him, like she can't really believe he wants to hear, but tells him anyway. "I got careless. I visited my parents' graves and Maddox, one of Bracken's men, followed me to the warehhouse I'd been staying the night instead of a new location like I should've." She hasn't stayed in the same place for over twenty-one hours since Maddox and Coonan found her two days after fleeing and left her with a practically useless leg. I took her three years to go back to jogging and running because she'd had to re-learn how to walk without a limp first.

He knows the files, knows the names, so she barely has to explain. "Maddox and Lockwood, teamed up on me, bound me in a chair and shoved a bottle's worth of Vodka down my throat after giving me a pill." She must've been terrified, is the one thing going through Castle's head. He can't imagine a situation like that. He can hear in her tone that she didn't go down without a fight, which is probably where she got the bruises on her eyes. "I didn't swallow the pill and staying sober is easier when you don't get to move." He knows exactly what she means. He can drink as much as he wants, but the real buzz hits the moment he stands up and notices exactly how empty his bottle is. "They freed my hand so I could hold the gun and pull the trigger. I shot Lockwood pretty much as an accident, and Maddox got a bottle to the head. After that, I was out." She'd sat outside for ages, hoping to wake up before her assassin did.

She's leaving parts out, he can tell. The story is missing details. The killers and Kate have a history, she's escaped from them before. The former detective might have taunted them, challenged them, and even bound and not-quite-helpless she'd won.

He wants to reply, but his vision is getting blurry, the glass slipping from his fingers and shattering on the floor, wine staining the carpet and splattering on the side of the couch. The last thing he sees is an empty tube in her hand as she helps him lie down.


	3. Chapter 3

Kate can still remember with perfect clarity when the statue on her desk hit the precinct floor and revealed a tape. Only suspecting what it was, she fled from the precinct, ignoring Ryan and Esposito as they called for her.

That day, she found out that her Captain, her mentor, her boss and her friend, all the same person, and he'd betrayed her. Senator Bracken had already risen through the ranks, and turned out to be untouchable. Every meeting she had was bugged, every ally turned up dead, and Kate spend eight years hiding until even her greatest enemy couldn't find her.

Today, she sits on the rooftop with Elena Markov, whom she paid with money she syphoned from one of Bracken's overseas accounts, intercepting it before he could add it to his campaign treasure chest. There are things you have to do when you are unable to hold down a job, and when it involved dirty money Kate didn't have many moral obligations left.

She met Elena after impersonating the woman years ago in an attempt to get close to Lazarus, whom she had assumed to be Vulcan Simmons at the time, and funded Bracken for a reason she'd not cared to find out. The Russian assassin was loyal to the highest bidder, and today, that was Kate. A ridiculous sum of money to play back-up to a sniper had been too good for Markov to resist, even on something as suicidal as this. If her instincts are still good, she's right in assuming the other woman and her parttime boss had a falling out not long ago.

They're dressed like Bracken's security team, the men who used to wear the uniforms tied up and sedated two floors down. Elena is skillfully communicating with the other team with hand gestures only, seeing as communication devices can be compromised. Kate has to admire the woman's professionalism, even if she hates everything the Russian stands for.

She takes a second to appreciate the rumor that Putin himself hired her as an assassin because he wants Bracken as US President. The year Kate spent in Russia is a priceless fact for conspiracy theorists. Bracken somehow has more friends than he has enemies, probably because he has them killed.

She lies down next to Elena, her elbows resting on the concrete while she points her rifle at the heart of the newly announced President Bracken. Applause rises from around the world. From her scope, she spots the new leader starting his speech.

"We're going for the shortest presidency ever, right?" Markov jokes from behind her binoculars. She tells Beckett to adjust for the light breeze and gives her some new rounds to penetrate the bulletproof glass.

The huge screens switch to black, the microphone turning of mid-way through a sentence about keeping promises. People haven't even processed the glitch yet when pages from Kate's dossier appear, accompanied by the speakers loudly playing Bracken's confession to murder.

Elena rushes through the motions of packing up and has disappeared while Kate searches the crowd, her rifle moving through the crowd to find the once face of the man responsible, rich and influential enough to have a ticket to the President's rise to power.

Richard Castle is in the back, a satisfied smile on his face as he searches the crowd for the woman he saved with a subtlety she'd accused him of not having.


End file.
